


rest your soul away

by dollylux



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 14:39:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10992987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: character study of heather garland, daniel's mother.





	rest your soul away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homo_pink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/gifts).



> for my ladybug. i love you. <3
> 
> title from 'chloe dancer/crown of thorns' by mother love bone.

Heather Garland doesn’t look like much.

Sure, she’s beautiful. And in a town like this, that’s pretty rare. But beauty don’t mean that people take her seriously. It usually means the opposite. Beauty makes people crazy. Makes people forget things like rules and laws and boundaries and things their mama taught them. Beauty makes drunk stepdaddies get their hands between 12-year-old legs and talk about cherries while mama’s in the shower and it makes high school boyfriends think they own her and ex-husbands want to kill her because they don’t anymore.

Beauty means Heather’s been fucked over and fucked, been beaten and thrown from moving cars, been held at gunpoint and even been shot. Twice.

It’s the bulletholes that make her the maddest. One on her left shoulder and one just above her right hip. She’d rubbed aloe into them like a new religion, but they’d still scarred. Goddamn bastards.

She’s all of five foot nothing and under a hundred pounds unless she’s pregnant. Her blonde hair is natural, bright as Jonbenet’s even if she has to iron the curls in every morning, and her eyes are bluer than a July sky. She’s little all over; jailbait tits and a middle school cheerleader’s ass, and the tightest pussy in all of Georgia. Hell, maybe even the South.

She stares at her reflection in the mirror speckled with toothpaste and popped zit gunk, rubbing her strawberry red lips together and staring critically at her filled-in eyebrows, at her powder-soft face, at the long eyelashes that she’d worn onstage last night and that get her some good tips at the diner, too.

She’s small, and maybe she got her shorts in the kid’s department at Wal-Mart, but she’s tough as hell. She’s a survivor, and she knows how to use her five-inch heels as weapons that’ll put a grown man in the hospital.

And if that don’t work, she’s got a .45 in her denim purse.

“Thanks again, Linda,” Heather says as she grabs up her keys and her smokes, heels clicking loud on the hollow floor of the trailer. Her middle-aged neighbor looks up from Judge Judy and smiles at Heather, lifting her cigarette to wave goodbye while she holds Heather’s little boy, Caleb, with her other arm.

Heather pauses, taking a mind-picture of Caleb’s blond curls and his diapered butt, the way his soft cheek is resting on Linda’s saggy chest while he dozes. He’ll be a year old next month, and Heather doesn’t think she’s ever loved anything so much in her life.

She’s out the door and down the three concrete block steps, heels crunching on gravel, before she stops dead in her tracks, her eyes wide open in surprise, like she’d just got stabbed and didn’t know it was coming at all.

That’s a lie. Of course it’s a lie. Because Daniel.

Daniel exists.

It’s not fair to love something so much and not be able to save it, or help it. Really help it. It shouldn’t be like that. Heather hadn’t known that’s how love really was. She’d never really loved anything until Daniel.

He’d been born almost two months early, a smart kid trying to get out of her toxic womb. She’d been on drugs pretty bad then, on too many things to even try to stop. She’d sworn off cigarettes for the whole seven months she’d been pregnant with him, and she’d even finished out junior year. 

Only one C on her report card, too.

Daniel had barely been five pounds, and he’d spent his first month in the hospital in a little baby chamber, hooked up to God knows what and trying to survive. And he did, of course; and he came home to live with Heather and his daddy, and it had been so perfect then. Just like a song.

But there are all kinds of songs, and this one ended in divorce, with her in the hospital and Johnny Hawthorne in jail for kidnapping, theft, and attempted murder.

Two goddamn bulletholes.

Wynonna Judd’s telling her no one else on earth could ever hurt her when she starts up the car and the radio blares on, and she spares a glance back at the trailer, wondering if it would be worth it to be a few minutes late if she can call Daniel in San Antonio, just to say hi. 

She knows if she’s late one more time, Thompson’ll fire her. He’d be more than glad to. Had it out for her ever since she stopped sucking his four inches for every other weekend off.

Even Heather Garland has her limits.

She digs her heel into the floorboard and presses down with the tip of her tiny foot, sliding her heart-shaped sunglasses down over her blue eyes as she peels out of the trailer park in her third-hand Buick, promising herself that she’ll call Daniel tomorrow.

Or at least by the weekend. For sure.

 

Linda’s outside when Heather gets home a few minutes before midnight, and she’s clutching the cordless phone in her hand and frowning hard at Heather who can’t seem to move from behind the wheel, who is suddenly annoyed beyond belief at the dentist office commercial on the radio and at the blisters on her feet and the fact that she has to work a double at the diner in the morning.

She doesn’t realize that her heart is racing, that she’s gripping the wheel, that she’s frozen in place.

“Honey, I need to talk to you,” Linda says, not coming any closer to the car, her long nails clicking fretfully on the plastic of the phone. “Come on out of the car.”

“What is it?” Heather asks, forcing normalcy into her voice as she finally kills the engine and turns off the headlights, reaching for her purse in the passenger seat and the sweet tea in her cup holder.

She takes a few steps toward Linda and digs around in her pack of Kool’s for the half-smoked cigarette she’d lit on her last break.

“Your brother called,” Linda says after a minute, and the words don’t sound right, don’t sound like exactly what Linda wants to say. And Heather’s always been a painfully direct person. She lights her cigarette and sucks in a quick drag, the melting ice rattling in the styrofoam cup gripped in her trembling hand.

She blinks, the fake lashes making it feel like her eyes weigh a thousand pounds all of a sudden.

Her brother. The pastor in San Antonio. Two perfect kids, stuck-up cunt of a wife. He’d been all too eager to take Daniel in, to try and fix him, pray away the gay and all the dark, twisted-up parts of Daniel’s soul that had led to him holding little Caleb under the water in the bathtub and the utter lack of remorse or awareness on his beautiful face when Heather had found them. Just in time.

“Why did Billy call?” She flicks her cigarette, hard. Hand flying out to take the phone from Linda, her bracelets tinkling. “Is everything okay? Did he say--”

“Just… just call him back, sweetheart,” Linda all but begs, her voice crackling like a lost station, trembling in the humid night. The cigarette falls from Heather’s hand, smoke caught in her dark lungs. She exhales in a choked sob.

“Tell me, Linda, god _damnit_. You tell me what’s going on!” Her voice ratchets up to a scream, hysteria racing through her like lightning. Like she already knows.

She knows.

“It’s… oh, Heather, honey. It’s Daniel. I-It’s your beautiful little boy. It’s Danny!” Linda is shrill, her voice ugly with emotion, and she reaches for Heather who suddenly can’t feel anything, who drops her cup and her keys and crumples to her knees, one ankle snapping hard as she hits the ground.

 

There’s no need for her to go to Texas, Billy says. They’ll take care of all the arrangements. They’ll make sure his body is brought back to Georgia. He’ll pay for the funeral, don’t worry about a thing. 

Nothing for her to do but sit at home and not eat, not speak, not move.

Linda had taken Caleb next door with her, had promised to take good care of him. Heather’s curled up on the couch where Linda and Patrick had placed her, a crocheted throw over her limp body, cigarettes and lighter on the coffee table, just within reach.

He’d sliced his wrists. Bled out in the bathtub. Hadn’t left a note, that they could find. Billy said his boyfriend found him, some broken-hearted creature who had crawled into the bathtub with him and had been so covered in blood when Billy found them that he’d thought they were both dead.

Maybe if that stupid kid had done something. Had called someone. Had told somebody instead of feeling sorry for himself, her baby would be alive.

Her little boy who hated carrots but loved sweets, every kind of fruit Heather could find. Who used to pick blackberries from around the mailboxes at the end of the drive here at the trailer park, who would come home with a stained purple mouth and violet fingertips. Her darling boy who had bad allergies and a destitute mama who couldn’t afford shots or medicine for him, who stayed sick a lot and fell behind in school and had to repeat the third grade because of it. Her brave boy who loved to read, who memorized whole stanzas of Shel Silverstein and could tell her the plot of _The Hobbit_ in painful detail and who recorded songs off the radio on her old tape deck and listen to the tapes until they got garbled and broken with love.

Her Danny boy who never ate enough and had blue veins that matched his blue eyes and who shivered cold in layers in the middle of the summer and who would lay outside in the field next to the dumpsters with Heather on warm nights where they would share cigarettes and listen to Joy Division and Psychedelic Furs and he’d tell her about his favorite dead musicians and his favorite things about boys’ bodies and that he maybe wanted to be a writer one day, a real writer. Not just one who keeps things hidden in notebooks, but the kind who shares things. And her boy always had so many thoughts, so many dark and dreamy thoughts, so many things he could share with the world. So much pain that he needed to find words for.

He was her best friend. They grew up together, and she sent him away so she didn’t break him more than she already had, so that maybe he could be held together long enough to mend. She thought maybe Billy could do that. Maybe the dry, hot flats of Texas could do that. Maybe somebody who loved him enough in all the ways he needs it could do it. Maybe somebody could succeed where Heather failed.

She sent him away to save him. And she’s getting him back in a coffin.

 

She shows up at the funeral home the night before the burial with a pillow, blanket, and Daniel’s old boombox in tow, her face smeared with makeup and slack with drugs and no sleep. She can barely keep her eyes open as Mr. Latham runs up to her with his keys in hand, ready to lock up for the night.

“What are you doing? You can’t be here. We’re about to close up. The burial’s tomorrow, Ms. Hawthorne--”

“I’m Ms. _Garland_ ,” Heather informs him, forcing her eyes open so she can meet his with a glare. “And I’m spending the night with my baby. Now get outta my way.”

She shoulders past him and marches through the funeral home to the back where she knows Daniel is sleeping in his casket. She comes to a stop beside it, the cheap, wooden thing that they’d decided on, quick and easy. It doesn’t matter. She knows it doesn’t. He’s gonna rot anyway. He’s dead, no matter how pretty the box.

She puts the boombox on top of the casket curls up in a chair that she pulls right up next to it, kicking her pumps off and resting her head against the side of the box. She can feel him here, swears she can, can feel the cornsilk softness of his hair brushing her cheek, can smell the rose and cigarettes of him.

Her sweet boy.

“I’m… I’m really not supposed to let you in here,” Latham tries to say, but Heather can tell he’s already given in.

“Leave us alone,” she says, reaching up blindly to push play on the CD loaded in there. “For when you miss me,” the silver disc says on the top in Sharpie, in Daniel’s handwriting. It’d come in the mail from him a month after he’d moved to Texas, full of their old nighttime songs, full of Ian Curtis and Robert Smith and Bernard Sumner and Ian McCulloch and Richard Butler.

But it starts with “Under the Milky Way.” Daniel’s favorite song.

She hears the door close, hears the lock turn, feels the quiet settle in behind the music. She turns to press her lips to the side of the coffin, the last goodnight kiss she gives her son.

Her little boy who was always afraid of the dark lies pale and still on a bed of satin, locked forever away where no light can touch him again.


End file.
